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Passage Illustrated

On the first night, I was knocked up [i. e., awakened by a knocking] by
Jack with a most wonderful ship's lantern in his hand, like the gills of some monster of
the deep, who informed me that he "was going aloft to the main truck," to have the
weathercock down. It was a stormy night and I remonstrated; but Jack called my attention
to its making a sound like a cry of despair, and said somebody would be "hailing a ghost"
presently, if it wasn't done. So, up to the top of the house, where I could hardly stand
for the wind, we went, accompanied by Mr. Beaver; and there Jack, lantern and all, with
Mr. Beaver after him, swarmed up to the top of a cupola, some two dozen feet above the
chimneys, and stood upon nothing particular, coolly knocking the weathercock off, until
they both got into such good spirits with the wind and the height, that I thought they
would never come down. ["The Mortals in the House," pages 288-289]

Commentary

Whereas Mahoney has selected for illustration the narrative which Dickens
contributed to the first Christmas story for his new weekly periodical,
All the Year Round,
in 1859, other illustrators of the piece in the various anthologies seem not to have been
interested in it, for neither the American Household
Edition volume of 1876 nor Furniss's Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910) contains
an illustration for The Haunted House. On the other hand, in the
1877 British Household Edition E. G. Dalziel has illustrated "The Mortals in the House"
with An Insuperable and
Speechless Man, He Had Sat at His Supper, with Streaker Present in a Swoon.
That the most of the framed tales for 1859 are not by Dickens is probably not significant
in its being overlooked or bypassed by later illustrators, for none of the framed tales
for Christmas (discounting 1867's No Thoroughfare and The Perils of Certain English Prisoners ten years earlier, both
written by the collaborative team of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins) had in them a
preponderance of material from the journal's "Conductor." The illustrators may simply
have felt that the satire of spiritualism was not conducive to pictures — and the
other, more dynamic stories in the 1859 sequence were, of course, not by Dickens and
therefore do not appear in the anthologies of 1868, 1876, 1877, 1910, and 1911.

Its Context in The Extra Number for Christmas, 1859

Dickens and Wills [his sub-editor] laid plans for the Christmas number in
September 1859, when Wills wrote out to a dozen potential contributors on Dickens's
behalf, setting out "the simplest [idea] in the world" by way of a central concept and
framework for submissions, but by late November, Dickens complained to [his business
agent] Forster, despite having "myself described" this idea "in writing, in the most
elaborate manner" "not a story has come to me in the least belonging to" it (Letters 9: 169). Instead, "every one" of the submissions — in
fact, only two out of the five not by Dickens himself — "turns, by a strange
fatality, on a criminal trial!" Called The Haunted House, the
number was intended to feature a group of guests staying in a house, reputedly haunted,
whose only visitations turn out, at the end of the festive season, to have been made by
the memories of their own pasts — thus acting as a kind of reproof to the more
credulous and literal-minded believers in the Spiritualist movement . . . . [Drew,
207]

For this first framed tale for his new journal Charles Dickens himself contributed an
introduction ("The Mortals in the House"), the fifth story, "The Ghost in the Corner
Room," and the seventh and final tale, "The Ghost in the Corner Room." In the subsequent,
anthologised texts, however, the seven-part, multi-voiced, multiply authored story became
simply The Haunted House. In Three Chapters, namely those by
Dickens. Excised from the series were the stories of children's author Hesba Stretton
("The Ghost in the Clock Room"), the "smart" young journalist and Dickens protegé
George Augustus Sala ("The Ghost in the Double Room"), Adelaide Anne Procter ("The Ghost
in the Picture Room"), the novelist and regular columnist for Dickens, Wilkie Collins ("The Ghost in the Cupboard
Room"), and the protofeminist novelist and north of England writer
Elizabeth Gaskell (who provided "The
Ghost in the Garden Room"). As Deborah A. Thomas notes, Dickens's apportioning out
writing tasks to a stable of regulars — some of them first-rate writers such as
Collins and Gaskell, but some of them decidedly inferior — has produced a rather
uneven texture in the original sequence. The problem with the reprinted version is that
it lacks some of the original's coherence since it includes only work by Dickens
himself.

James Mahoney's 1868 illustration for the Library Edition, the last complete edition
from Chapman and Hall for which Dickens would have had input, concerns the most exciting
moment in Dickens's introductory tale. As in the picture, the narrator (who has rented
the old mansion north of London) and two companions go up on the roof of the "haunted"
eighteenth-century house to take down a damaged weathercock which has been creating a most
unpleasant noise in the high wind. As is consistent with the text, Jack and Mr. Beaver
appear to be practised "old salts" who are not the least bothered by the stormy sky, the
wind, or the height of the cupola upon which they are precariously balanced, although
Mahoney's chimney (right) is less convincing than his drain pipe and down-spout (right of
centre).

A Note on the 1911 Text

The two volumes containing the Christmas stories do not indicate where they
fall in the 36-volume sequence. The "Bibliographical Note" on the verso of the title-page
makes reference to the Charles Dickens Edition of 1871, although this text has been
augmented by five stories from "Reprinted Pieces" and two others, "What Christmas Is As
We Grow Older" and "The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices," "which were not always
included in the collected works of the novelist."